Signaling Mechanisms in Heart Regeneration

The Tzahor team studies novel mechanisms of mammalian cardiac regeneration and repair following injury, a major challenge in current biomedical research (Tzahor and Poss, Science 2017) using mouse, rats and pigs’ models. We are focusing on the role of NRG1-ErbB2 signaling pathway in cardiac regeneration after revealing that ErbB2 is both necessary and sufficient to promote cardiac regeneration in adult mice (D’Uva et al., NCB 2015). We also study the cardiac microenvironment as a mean to enhance the regenerative potential of the heart (Yahalom et al., eLIFE 2015). We recently revealed that the proteoglycan, Agrin can serve as an inducer of mammalian heart regeneration, with a great therapeutic potential for the treatment of ischemic heart disease (Bassat et al., Nature 2017; Sarig et al., Circulation 2019). Current studies examine the therapeutic effects of Agrin, whose administration into injured heart of pigs elicits a significant regenerative response. Our findings together have significant implications for improving current strategies to treat heart disease in human.